"Are you Christian? Don't get addicted to these things... rather use them to point people to JESUS."

Amen to that!

We had an interesting discussion about MySpace in our young adults bible study group on monday night - as to whether we should be discouraging our youth kids from using myspace or not.

Personally I'm quite against MySpace (and as a result don't plan to ever have my own page), but our youth group has it's own MySpace page (click here). It's been quite a good way to communicate with kids, and to get some christian stuff into their pages (which for some wouldn't be there otherwise). We're also in the process of developing some stuff for our kids to put onto their MySpace page, to identify that they are a Christian and/or that they are part of St Matts Youth.

Haven't played around with Facebbok myself, but I think you're pretty accurate in saying that Facebook generally = 23+ age bracket, whilst MySpace = 14-23 age bracket...

Love to hear other people's thoughts...

(BTW - Bad link to your MySpace page Dave - just a typo) top

typos galore! (look at the comments in the post before this one...)

what are you thoughts on why you are against it. i'm against it becasue it breaks the international rules of don't have ugly websites!!

i think it's a neutral thing. good stuff happens on it. so does bad stuff. i know that there will be youth kids in there. i want to ecnourage them to do good stuff. to be Christian. i also want to help them think about safety with personal details etc...
and i also want parents to know what their kids are doing online.

on our youth camp i had myspace in the application at least once maybe twice... and ecnouraged people to be Christian there. it's been great to see young dudes putting up bible verses and so forth on their sites. top

I'm against it for a few reasons. Yes it does break all the rules about not having ugly websites - but i think that it also fosters unhelpful and ungodly behaviour (as a generalisation...but can be hard to avoid).

The whole rationale behind MySpace is that it is a place to promote yourself, to add people to your friends list, and then get comments from them. It basically becomes a popularity contest. It's amazing how many people post bulletins (amazingly regularly too) which simply say something like "I've updated my profile. Please leave comments" or "i've added new pics. please comment them"

the other issue (which you also mentioned) is the sharing of personal details. so many teenagers put personal info on there, and particularly photos which really should be there for all the world to see...

whilst there is plenty of bad, there is also heaps of good (as you pointed out). I'm constantly encouraged by the MySpace pages of heaps of our youth kids who so obviously stand out as Christian, and are keen to share this with the world.

So - good stuff, bad stuff. The conclusion that we came to in our bible study, is that we're not going to stop kids from using MySpace, and so we may as well continue to encourage them to use it in a positive way. It would be like saying that Christians shouldn't own a TV simply because there are bad programs on there...

"I also want parents to know what their kids are doing online."

How do you think that we effectively go about doing that? top